


Between Two Lungs

by specialcal



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: 5sos AU, Human Michael, Lashton - Freeform, M/M, Mermaids, Merman Calum, Mermen, Mythology - Freeform, OT4, gay shit, hopefully this is what ur supposed to do, how do u do these, malum, malum au, malum r gay mermaids what more can i say, mythical creatures, supernatural 5sos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/specialcal/pseuds/specialcal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drowning wasn't how Michael expected it to be.<br/>There wasn't a white light or a tunnel up to heaven. His life didn't even flash before his eyes. Just purple. Countless shades of purple was all he could see, like swimming in Ribena.<br/>Michael felt his heartbeat slow and arms and legs go numb as his brain shut down. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the current playing with his fingers as the silky water lowered him down into the dark. </p>
<p>Or, the one where Calum is always in the right place at the right time, and happens to have pointy teeth and a sharks tail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Two Lungs

***I just want to make a quick note, major drowning warning if that might trigger you! Not suicide but kind of intentional drowning so !! please don't read this if it might upset you :+) if you want me to explain in further detail so you know if it's safe for you, just message me on tumblr @specicalcal!***

####  .. Michael .. 

Drowning wasn't how Michael expected it to be.  
There wasn't a white light or a tunnel up to heaven. His life didn't even flash before his eyes. Just purple. Countless shades of purple was all he could see, like swimming in Ribena.  
But unlike swimming, this hurt.  
His lungs felt like they were going to implode and his chest spasmed as it tried to rid itself of the water gushing into his body. His arms thrashed feebly, he had been fighting to the surface for so long. Everything felt sleepy and dull, like trying to wake up from a deep sleep.

Michael felt his heartbeat slow and arms and legs go numb as his brain shut down. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the current playing with his fingers as the silky water lowered him down into the dark. 

\----------

####  .. Calum .. 

Calum tugged at his long black hair in annoyance, trying to tease out the knots. He cursed his thick curls he had inherited from his mother, while being beautiful they were horrible to maintain.  
He shifted his long, slender body on the sandy drift he was perched on and made a quick decision. Calum didn't care what anyone thought of him, anyway.  
He gathered the curls that were floating around his face and pulled them into a small ponytail in his fist, reaching for his rusted pocket knife and flicking it open. With one last glance around he began hacking away at the base of his ponytail. 

A few minutes later he had managed to cut his previously jaw length hair into a raggedy, curly mohawk. Calum ran his fingers through his new haircut and grinned at himself, enjoying the weightless feeling.  
He watched the clumps of hair he had cut off float away, not wanting to keep any, contrary to his people’s tradition. He liked being spontaneous like this. Keeping away from schedules and timetables and just doing whatever he wanted.  
Lost in his excitement at the haircut, he didn't notice a dark shape looming in the corner of his vision. He yelped, simultaneously sliding off his seat in the sand and tightening his grip on his knife, causing it to dig into the center of his hand. He cried out again, but it was cut short as he gasped, realising what the shape was.  
There was a blue haired boy drifting through the water in front of him, his limp body twisting gently in the current. 

\--------------------

####  .. Michael .. 

Michael drifted in and out of consciousness to the sound of waves lapping near his feet. “Waves?” he thought, the sudden realisation hitting him.  
His eyes flew open and he hoarsely shouted, "ASH."  
He desperately sat up, scattering sand everywhere, but regretted it 2 seconds later when the world spun. Michael leant over and threw up salt water, but not as much as he thought he had swallowed.  
Through the purple spots dancing in his streaming eyes, he saw sand heaped over his legs and the vague outline of a boy sitting half in the water at his feet.  
"Lie back down," the boys’ worried and strangely accented voice said, and he leant over and shoved Michael’s chest so that he flopped back into the sand, "Stop moving or you'll pass out again. I half buried you in the sand so that you wouldn't be cold."  
Michael opened his eyes and looked as far to the side as he could without moving his neck. He saw a familiar, secluded cove with high cliffs hemming in the beach and heard the faint cries of children at the next beach along. Coopers Beach. The beach he had grown up on. A strangled sob escaped his lips and he shut his eyes again, not needing to see any more. It hadn't worked. Of course it hadn't. 

"Hey, um…" the boy at Michael’s feet said slowly, gasping oddly between his words, "Are you ok? I mean- I know you aren't ok at all right now, but… I’ve seen you swimming here before and you’re such a good swimmer I don’t know how..." His voice faded, and they sat in awkward silence. Michael didn’t feel like explaining everything to this random stranger.  
"How long have I been here?" He managed, ending in a cough.  
"Like, a night and half of today. It's around 1pm." The dark haired boy replied, and Michael could imagine him biting his lip to stop himself from asking anything. His voice sounded strange, almost like he was trying to talk around the words in his mouth.  
Michael opened one eye and lifted his neck a bit, trying to see who this kid was. 

What he saw made Michael forget about the fact that he was lying on a beach, half drowned and crying. He gasp-croaked and thrashed around, managing to shake the sand off his legs and scrabbling back up the beach. ‘It’ had roughly cut short hair and big brown eyes, on a curious, human looking face. It had two identical slits on either side of its neck, gills, Michael realised. Its torso was a beautiful bronze colour, its well-muscled chest and arms scattered with various tattoos. At its belly button the bronze skin started fading to the same silky black of its hair, but it wasn’t until the tops of where its thighs should be that the skin had totally changed to a thick black rubbery armor. The black skin rode high over his hips and down in a sharp V towards a weathered black loin cloth covering most of a considerably large bulge, which, in other situations, Michael would have blushed at. After glancing at the bulge for a millisecond too long, Michael noticed that the ‘kid’ wasn’t actually being bitten in half by a shark, the magnificent black tail that swayed gently in the current was _actually attached to him._

After two years of searching for these creatures, two years of mourning the ‘drowned’ boyfriend they never found, two years of parents anxiously tugging their kids along when he walked past, two years of “You’re fucking crazy, mate” and two years of loneliness that caught in his throat, Michael thought of nothing rational. Instead, his heart pounding in his ears loud enough that he couldn’t hear himself speak, Michael asked:  
“You- You guys actually have dicks? They’re not in the pictures.” And blacked out. 

\----------------------

Michael woke again to the sound of waves with the sand beneath him and felt a strange sense of Déjà vu.  
The events of the past day came crashing down on him and he quickly sat up, a bolt of adrenaline bringing him to his senses. ‘It’ wasn’t there anymore, the empty waves lapped peacefully below his toes. Michael’s chest felt like it was collapsing and a sob rose in his throat. Was the creature even real? Had he imagined it? After everything that happened, having a hallucination of the things that had haunted his dreams wasn’t unlikely. Michael gathered his thoughts and pushed them away to the back of his mind, slowly rising to his feet. His head throbbed deep in his skull and he wobbled along the beach, across the rocky U shape to where the cliff met the water, and Coopers Beach waited on the other side. His clothes were mostly dry after spending so many hours passed out, and Michael reckoned he didn’t look too bad after drowning and then waking up to a hot shark man sitting by his feet. 

He rounded the corner of the cove and stepped onto the golden sand of Coopers Beach, squinting in the bright sun and feeling his heart sink as a familiar shape jogged over to him.  
“Hi Kat.” Michael sighed dejectedly, keeping a quick pace along the beach to his house so they wouldn’t have to talk for too long.  
“Hi Mikey!” Kat beamed, her enthusiastic tone and blindingly red life guard top hurting Michael’s brain. He didn’t need human interaction right now.  
“What have you been up to?” She asked, eyeing his sandy clothes and mussed hair.  
“Well I uh-“Michael began, but the blonde was onto other topics.  
“There’s a beach party with all the lifeguards tonight, if you want to come along. You can come with me? It’s just gonna be a bonfire and stuff, nothing serious. Unless you want it to be more serious, then we could probably go back to mine-“  
“Kat, listen.” Michael interrupted, stopping in his tracks and placing an awkward hand on her shoulder, “I really appreciate you being so nice to me all the time and stuff, and I know your intentions, and I think it’s time I told you I’m seriously not interested.”  
Kat opened and closed her mouth like a startled fish, her wide green eyes confused and hurt.  
“I…”  
She looked like she was going to start crying so Michael quickly continued, “The thing is K… I’m not really into girls. I’m gay. As fuck.”  
She made a choking noise in the back of her throat, “ _Really?_ I didn’t… _Oh….._ ” Michael watched her slowly put the pieces together. Him and Ash, the kid from their Calculus class. Always skipping school together. Michael never having a proper girlfriend. Michael struggling to sit down some days.  
“So, yeah.” Michael said awkwardly, coming out wasn’t getting any easier.  
Kat gave him a tight lipped smile, “Right. No problem, Mike. It might have been better if you told me like, 2 and a half years earlier but whatever. See you at the party maybe!” She squeezed his arm and jogged off as fast as she had arrived.  
Michael frowned, dismissing the conversation already and slowly following her footsteps up the beach. As he hobbled on toward the road where his family’s small house sat, a plan began to hatch in his mind. 

\---------------------- 

It was simple what Michael had to do, really. He had considered it before, but always brushed the idea off, deeming it taking things too far. But now that the possibility of these mermaid things existing was real, he had to try. 

He was going to catch one. 

\----------------------

Michael had taken a few days to gather the supplies he needed, a large trawler net, thick rope and some plastic bottles to keep the top of the net afloat. He skipped his last class the day that he was ready and went down to the familiar cove, where he hadn’t yet returned since the incident. Lugging his load of equipment across the beach to the furthest cliff he reached the place he would set up his trap – a tiny gap between the water and overhanging rocks that from years of exploring Michael knew led to a hidden cave. As a child he had never thought much of the strange symbols carved into the walls, and even the tiny ‘LUKE WAS HERE’ scratched into the floor. He assumed drunk teenagers. But now he knew that something else was going on in this secluded hideaway, and that it was an important place to start.

He lowered himself down into the sea next to the gap, treading water and grabbing his things with one hand. He took a deep breath and pulled his body under and through the gap. Michael came out the other side and into the air pocket, making sure he didn’t breathe too deeply in as the oxygen in the cave would eventually run out. He pulled himself up out of the water and onto the gritty floor. He didn’t even shiver from the chill as he quickly got to work, securing the net around the underwater entrance of the cave, so that the hole he had cut was right in the middle. The massive length of merpeople along with the small amount of room in the underwater part of the cave ensured that once a creature swam in, there wouldn’t be enough room for it to turn around and navigate out of the small hole. Because just like fish and sharks, or anything with gills, merpeople can’t swim backwards, which Michael knew from years of study. He prayed that the blueish green rope used in the trawling net to fool fish would also fool a human brain, and that the mermaid would swim in right in the middle of the opening and not touch the net at all. The chances of it actually working were minuscule, but Michael had hope. He always had hope.

And, of course, a few days after his spiders web was woven, he caught his first unsuspecting fly.

**Author's Note:**

> ***THIS FIC IS NAMED AFTER THE SONG 'BETWEEN TWO LUNGS' BY FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE SO LISTEN 2 IT FOR VIBES***  
> actually this fic is basically inspired by the album lungs by florence and the machine so give that a listen its fire
> 
> anyway
> 
> IM SCREAMING HOPE U RATS ENJOYED THE FIRST CHAP OF MY FIC I KNOW ITS LOWKEY TRASH BUT I PROMISE IT WILL GET BETTER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OBVIOUSLY MORE WILL B REVEALED BC I LOVE VAGUEING AND PUTTING U ALL IN PAIN SO YA STAND BY FOR LASHTON AS WELL AND TELL ME WHAT U THINK SO FAR ON MY TUMBLR SPECIALCAL.TUMBLR.COM  
> (also the cove is kinda hard 2 explain so if u don’t get what I mean look @ [ this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cove#/media/File:McWay_cove_1.jpg) ) and the cave is literally the cave from h2o hope u know that skkdkjsdn  
> ( also more info here r two pics of how i imagine calum as a merman in case ur not sure !!  
> [here](http://memberfiles.freewebs.com/46/97/44589746/photos/merman-art/Merman_by_vashs_angel-1.jpg) and [here!](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/487092515920191562/)  
> one tiny last thing all the chapters r gonna be song titles if im sly about it so enjoy that 2


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